Rebels Read online

  ‘The arms are on their way,’ McDermott said.

  Clark’s eyes lit up. ‘Didn’t I always say, Sean, there’s no way to get the foreigner out of here except at the point of a gun.’

  They had been speaking for only five minutes when two trams went by in the direction of Howth, crammed with police and armed soldiers.

  ‘They’re on to us,’ Old Tom said.

  Sean jumped up. ‘I’ll hire a taxi and we’ll go and see.’

  In the harbour, Gordon Shephard and Figgis leaped on board to lend Childers a hand. The two ladies stepped ashore to be greeted by a charming, sandy-haired man with a handle-bar moustache and a smile that revealed a sunny nature.

  ‘Sorry Professor MacNeill could not be here,’ The O’Rahilly said. MacNeill was the Chairman of the Irish Volunteers. He gallantly kissed the ladies’ hands and told Molly in a broad Kerry accent, ‘You’re the greatest soldier, ma’am, indeed y’are.’

  To Molly’s American ears there came repeatedly what sounded like ‘Tremendjus’, These ladies are just after doing somet’ing tremendjus for Oirland.’

  Ammunition was rushed off by taxi to hiding-places all over the city, and the rifles were handed to the Volunteers.

  In their eagerness to help, some of them tore one of the Asgard’s sails. After instant repairs, Gordon and Mary Spring-Rice, together with The O’Rahilly, waved the Asgard farewell as the Childers sailed back to England to the cheers of Volunteers lining the quay.

  A Force 6 wind was blowing but Childers, with one last glance back at the now almost deserted pier, was content. He was proud to have made his contribution to Home Rule.

  If only he had know that Professor MacNeill was only nominally in charge of the Volunteers; that the arms he had risked his life for were now in the hands of extremists like Clarke and McDermott, who had no time for Home Rule but were set on establishing a Republic by force.

  The Volunteers headed back to Dublin, chatting noisily, their heads held high. For the first time, a thousand Irishmen in the south were in arms – even if they were not yet to be trusted with ammunition.

  Ahead of them and in their direct path, two trams with eighty police and a hundred armed troops aboard halted at Clontarf. The Crown forces alighted in utter silence and took up positions across the street.

  As soon as the Volunteers saw their way was barred they swung right into the Malahide Road.

  Harrell’s men wheeled to head them off. Once more the Volunteers, without ammunition, found themselves facing a double line of kilted soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets. Armed police, all of them giants, stood on either side of the troops at right angles.

  Captain Cobden gave the order, ‘Load.’ A pause. ‘Aim.’

  As the Volunteers shuddered to a halt, Harrell instructed his constables, ‘Seize their arms.’

  Most of them, not knowing the Volunteers had no live rounds, refused to budge. Those who stepped forward were cracked on the head with oak batons. The few members of the Royal Irish Constabulary present countered with rifle butts. In the scuffle, pistol-shots from the Volunteers grazed a couple of foreheads.

  The two forces disengaged and Hobson, who had driven up, advanced to parley with the Assistant Commissioner.

  ‘Our weapons,’ he said, ‘are not loaded. But any more trouble and they soon will be.’

  Hobson was joined by Darrell Figgis and Thomas MacDonagh, a university lecturer. Either of them could have talked the hind leg off a horse. MacDonagh, in particular, was a stocky, sharp-nosed whirlwind of speech and action.

  In his quick staccato voice, he addressed Harrell. ‘Begad, man, I ask you, what in heaven’s name are you up to?’

  Harrell seemed mesmerized, enabling Hobson to go back and make sure that Ned Daly was withdrawing his men through the nearest roadside hedge. That done, he phoned colleagues in Dublin to send every available vehicle for transporting the rifles into the city. Out of sight, Clarke and McDermott were already piling them into their taxi.

  With the soldiers stood at ease, MacDonagh and Figgis demanded to know of Harrell by what authority he was breaking the law. Then there was a planned distraction. A local celebrity known as Pope Flanagan rode up with a clatter on an enormous old nag and added his considerable voice to the discussion.

  In the general mêlée, a pint-sized Volunteer did his bit by grabbing the rifle of an RIC man, a giant who swung the rifle round with the titch hanging on for dear life.

  When Harrell managed to get a word in, he said the Volunteers had imported arms into Ireland against the 1913 Act.

  ‘Ah,’ said Figgis, ‘is that it?’ He insisted that the Volunteers had done no such thing. They simply took charge of them after they had been imported.

  ‘Then who did bring them in?’ asked Harrell, sardonically.

  ‘T’was me entirely, sir.’ Figgis held out his hands, asking to be handcuffed.

  Before Harrell could take up the offer, Chief Inspector Dunne signalled him madly. There was not a Volunteer in sight.

  Harrell, red-faced, told Captain Cobden he could stand his men down and return to barracks.

  ‘Into the trams, men,’ the Captain ordered, only to find that the trams, too, had mysteriously disappeared.

  It was a long march back to Dublin. News of the arms landing had spread. For two hours, along the way, the Scottish soldiers were ragged about their kilts and what mysteries were or were not hidden under them. In full gear, on a mid-summer’s day, they were at the end of their tether.

  Crowds had pelted them with sticks, stones and bottles. Some of the soldiers’ heads were streaming with blood. In addition, an astonishing number of hearses had whizzed past them on their way into the city. Citizens in the know removed their hats and signed themselves out of respect.

  A senior officer, Major Haigh, hearing what was going on, left barracks to take charge. Disgusted with the crowd, he ordered his men to make feinting movements with fixed bayonets to force them to keep their distance.

  The screaming and the stone-throwing went on.

  At 6.30 p.m., the troops reached the quay on the Liffey just west of O’Connell Street known as Bachelor’s Walk. The tram terminal was packed as usual on a Sunday evening. With the situation getting uglier by the minute Haigh halted his squad and ordered them, ‘About turn.’

  A handful knelt and aimed at onlookers who were still yelling abuse. The major had no idea that Cobden had made his men load at Clontarf. When he held up his hand for silence, one tired and frightened soldier took it as a signal to open fire. He pulled the trigger and twenty others followed suit, some firing twice.

  A stunned silence ensued as three people fell dead and thirty were wounded, one fatally. One of the dead – she was bayoneted as well as shot – was the mother of a soldier serving in the British army.

  Augustine Birrell, Chief Secretary for Ireland, a witty and humane man, was dining alone in his London home when he was informed of the arms landing and the tragedy in Bachelor’s Walk. He was deeply upset at the loss of life. Extremist Republicans, especially in America, were bound to make a meal of that. But there were more serious long-term consequences.

  There were now in Ireland two militant citizens’ forces deeply divided on the Home Rule issue. The Irish Volunteers had been bound to buy weapons once Carson had imported arms on a massive scale into Ulster.

  Birrell took a big dose of bicarbonate of soda for his dyspepsia. He was never without it. Once, when things were really bad, he had gone to a chemist’s shop and laid on the counter enough money to buy a pillar-box full.

  He went to the Irish Office. In the morning, a few Cabinet colleagues and several generals in the War Office would demand that he disarm the Volunteers. They knew nothing about Ireland, nor about the difficulty of trying to disarm civilian armies in cities full of sympathizers. It would lead to civil war.

  It was not until midnight eastern time that McGarrity found out that Howth had been a success. He ran upstairs to tell Casement. A day of agony and appreh
ension was over.

  An excited Devoy telephone, from New York. ‘I wanna tell you this is the greatest deed done in Ireland in a hundred years.’

  Casement knew that Devoy had not really trusted him before. He thought of him as a lackey who had for years served British interests as a consul. Well, he was a liability no more.

  McGarrity spoke of him as Wolfe Tone, an eighteenth-century patriot, reincarnate. Calls kept coming in through the night. Irish-Americans were delirious with pride, hope, joy. Newpapers kept asking for interviews.

  ‘Just think, Rory,’ McGarrity said, when the phone was momentarily silent, ‘there’s now a thousand of us armed and ready to fight for our independence!’

  Next day, in Dublin, Hobson received the first cable from the States pledging £1,000 ‘in recognition of splendid gunrunning into Howth’. For the first time in that generation Irish-Americans believed that the Irish back home were willing and able to help themselves. Soon American money was overflowing the Volunteers’ treasury. The O’Rahilly said, laughingly, ‘I can scarcely count the filthy stuff.’

  Hobson was keen to make propaganda out of what had happened on the quays. ‘The Bachelor’s Walk Massacre’ sounded fine. He had that special Irish talent for turning funerals into political demonstrations.

  The coffins of the victims were followed by Volunteers marching through Dublin with reversed arms to the music of ‘The Dead March’. A British soldier was photographed weeping as he accompanied the coffin of his mother. One banner in the procession read: ‘Killed by the King’s Own Scottish Murderers’.

  Masses were said and memorial services held all over Ireland.

  There was a lesson in this, but Birrell suspected politicians and generals were not capable of learning it. In the light of British atrocities century after century, the Irish, one of the most peace-loving races on earth, hated nothing more than the British gunning down their fellow Irishmen.

  But the troubles in Ireland were soon to be overshadowed by much bigger ones in Europe.

  Germany had been under Kaiser Wilhelm II for twenty-six years. The eldest grandson of Queen Victoria thirsted for popularity and power. He had a belligerent manner and a bull’s-horn moustache which seemed to defy the law of gravity and which he put each night in a Schnurrbartbinde, a moustache-bandage. A Court Circular once described his participation in a Sunday service as ‘the All-Highest paying his respects to the Highest’. If court preachers were to be believed, he and God were virtually indistinguishable.

  Wilhelm had colonial ambitions which required the build-up of a huge fleet to match Britain’s.

  Britain, naturally, assumed that the high seas, trade and colonial expansion were best left in her hands. To counter German expansion, she entered into a defensive alliance with Russia and France.

  And yet, in mid-1914, the European situation seemed tranquil enough. Towards the end of June, British vessels were on a friendly visit to Kiel. For the first time in years British and German ships moored side by side. There had been races, banquets, speeches, with the Kaiser presiding.

  Then on Sunday 28 June, like lightning in the night, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of the Austrian Emperor and heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was murdered in the streets of Sarajevo.

  At Kiel, Winston Churchill, the young cherubic-looking First Lord of the Admiralty, saw Kaiser Wilhelm come ashore from the white Imperial Yacht Hohenzollern with its ensign ‘Gott mit Uns’ and jump into a bright yellow Mercedes. The Great War Lord was enjoying the theatricality of the moment.

  To the man-in-the-street, an assassination by Serbian fanatics in, of all places, the Balkans, was a little local difficulty. The King of Italy in 1900 and the American President McKinley in 1901 had been struck down without it ending in war.

  Only the astutest politicians grasped that the Archduke’s death might be the spark to set the world alight. The Germans felt strong enough to fulfil their expansionist ambitions: Admiral Tirpitz had created their navy; Krupp would provide them with arms. They were more likely to act, believing that both Russia and Britain were menaced by civil war.

  Yet Germany drifted into war not from malice but from ineptitude; not because it wanted war but because it did not want peace enough. Hence it allowed its protégé Austria to make outrageous demands on Serbia without rebuke, even with secret encouragement.

  Winston Churchill believed that war in Europe was now more imminent than in Ireland, with Germany, France, Russia inevitably sucked in, and, with luck, Great Britain, too. He was soon proved correct.

  On the last day of July, Prime Minister Asquith was dining at Downing Street with Churchill and his Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey. They were discussing Russia’s threat to mobilize her forces when an official from Grey’s department came in with an urgent message from the British Embassy in Berlin. If the Russian mobilization was held up, it said, the Kaiser might be willing to restrain his ally, Austria.

  It was a slim chance but worth taking. Asquith decided to go at once to the Palace. He quickly wrote out a telegram.

  With no official car available, a secretary telephoned for a taxi. A cab-driver, suspecting that this was a leg-pull, stopped outside Number 10.

  Out stepped a familiar figure dressed formally in black.

  ‘Where to, Guv?’ the cabbie gulped.

  ‘Buckingham Palace,’ said Mr Asquith.

  The King had been asleep only forty minutes when his personal aide, Rear-Admiral Sir Colin Keppel, entered the royal bedroom and shook him awake. ‘The Prime Minister to see you, sir.’

  In the Audience Room, Asquith, his big face lined and tired, felt that this was the weirdest moment of his premiership as His Majesty appeared, only half awake, with a dressing-gown over his night-shirt.

  He would be obliged, he said, if the King would consent to send a telegram to Tzar Nicholas II, Emperor of all the Russias, in his own name. He held out the piece of paper. ‘If you’d care to look through it, sir?’

  ‘Can’t,’ said the King, who could only read big type. ‘Read it to me, if you would.’

  Asquith did so.

  The King said, hesitantly, that it would need one or two modifications.

  Asquith was perturbed. It was unlike His Majesty to meddle in diplomacy. ‘Changes, sir?’

  ‘Yes. Begin it thus: “My dear Nickie” and end it “Georgie”.’

  A relieved Asquith made a note of the changes and left.

  It was 1.40 a.m. on Saturday 1 August.

  From his beautiful lakeside home where he was breakfasting, Count von Bernstorff, the German Ambassador to Washington, could hear the beat of drums across the Starnberger See. Patriotic crowds a few miles away in Munich were singing ‘Deutschland über Alles’, among them a twenty-five-year-old failed painter and architect named Adolf Hitler.

  The telephone rang. Artur Zimmermann, the Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, apologized for interrupting his vacation but he would have to return to the United States at once. First, though, he was wanted in Berlin for a briefing.

  ‘Owing to troop movements, Excellency, the journey might take longer than usual.’

  At 5 o’clock that evening of 1 August, Germany took the initiative and declared war on Russia. The German Foreign Office was, therefore, pleased to receive a telegram from their Ambassador in London. For some time, Count Lichnowsky had been telling them that ‘the old Gentleman’ (Asquith) had no intention of going to war. Now, he said, Sir Edward Grey had assured him that if Germany did not violate French territory, Britain would remain neutral.

  When the Kaiser and the Chancellor heard this they were delighted. Wilhelm, above all, in spite of his bellicose talk, did not want a war in which his battleships would be sunk; they were to frighten off potential aggressors, not for use. He immediately caused Moltke, his Chief of Staff, great consternation by telling him he was wiring his cousin, George V, that if England guaranteed French neutrality, the Germans promised not to cross the Belgian frontier before 7 p.m. on 3 August.
/>   Kaiser Wilhelm was in a deep sleep in his Berlin Schloss when his man-servant, Schulz, woke him up. There was a telegram from George V. Ambassador Lichnowsky had misunderstood Grey’s words.

  The Chief of Staff was immediately summoned and his Imperial Majesty, clad only in his pyjamas and moustache-bandage, barked, ‘Mobilization has to be speeded up.’

  As Moltke left, the Kaiser was muttering, ‘To think that Georgie and Nickie should have deceived me. If grandmother had been alive, she would not have allowed it.’

  Though Monday 3 August was a Bank Holiday in England, the Commons reassembled at Westminster. The long green benches were crammed. Extra chairs were placed on the stretch of floor between the Bar and the Despatch table, usually neutral territory.

  When the Foreign Secretary rose to speak, he already knew that John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Nationalist MPs, had had a quiet word in Asquith’s ear.

  Grey had clean-cut, handsome features with a high smooth forehead and craggy nose. His manners and appearance were those of a quiet country gentleman.

  Germany, he declared, had tried to buy Britain off. It would be easy for that country if Britain remained neutral. But could she afford to be? Germany had demanded of the Belgians the right to pass through their territory. ‘The essence of the matter, is that Belgium must not be violated.’

  Members leaped to their feet in agreement, cheering and waving their order papers.

  With a hurried glance at Redmond, Sir Edward Grey went on: ‘The one bright spot in the very dreadful situation is that Ireland – and this I should like to be clearly understood abroad – is not a consideration among the things we have to take into account now.’

  Edward Carson looked at the Government front bench and saw tears running down Churchill’s cheeks.

  Few listened more attentively to the Foreign Secretary than Augustine Birrell, Britain’s Chief Secretary in Dublin. No one knew better than he the old maxim of Irish rebels: ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity.’ For days he had been asking himself how war would affect Ireland. If things went badly, Britain might need to keep a standing army there of 60,000 men.